Voltaire

An aside to Robert Lindsay (letter, March 12): It was not Patrick Henry but Voltaire who said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." DANIEL A. JENKINS Pacific Palisades

If your bucket list includes traipsing through Voltaire's private library or visiting the Vatican after hours, Kensington Tours' new Elite Collection offers a chance to get beyond the standard tourist experience. "Creating extraordinary experiences, no matter the size of a client's pocketbook, is what Kensington Tours was built on -- and for those with extra means what could be more extraordinary than behind-the-scenes access to the sights, people and cultures that have shaped our world," Phil Sproul, president of Kensington, said in an email.

According to Chris Tupper (Feb. 2), writing about the Hebrides, the French intellectual Voltaire talked with Samuel Johnson about a visit to the Hebrides. Voltaire and Johnson never met. Voltaire was talking with James Boswell, Johnson's famous biographer. See the beginning of Boswell's journal of the visit he and Johnson made to the Hebrides in 1773. ROBERT B. ORLOVICH Twentynine Palms

The New York Times characterizes the tsunami that struck coastal Japan as "murderous," while a friend writes that "Planet Earth is an unfriendly place. " I rode out the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in my seventh-floor apartment in San Francisco, which experience instilled in me an appropriate terror and respect for the fluidity of so-called terra firma. The epicenter of that 6.1 earthquake was located far from my home ? from which I infer that I can only imagine the power and trauma of a 9.0 quake centered close to the Japanese coast.

If your bucket list includes traipsing through Voltaire's private library or visiting the Vatican after hours, Kensington Tours' new Elite Collection offers a chance to get beyond the standard tourist experience. "Creating extraordinary experiences, no matter the size of a client's pocketbook, is what Kensington Tours was built on -- and for those with extra means what could be more extraordinary than behind-the-scenes access to the sights, people and cultures that have shaped our world," Phil Sproul, president of Kensington, said in an email.

VOLTAIRE by A. J. Ayer (Random House: $19.95; 224 pp.). The schoolboy's Voltaire is the Voltaire of "Candide." A. J. Ayer's aim is to present the Voltaire of the largely unread and little-known other works. He achieves this and more.

San Francisco law (Aug. 30) is very democratic; it forbids the rich, as well as the poor, from sleeping in doorways (with apologies to Voltaire). FRANKLIN C. ANDREWS JR. Escondido

Re "We've Had Enough Witch Hunts," Commentary, June 4: Let me get this straight. Robert Scheer would have us ignore the obvious. Like it or not, most terrorist acts over the last 30 years have been perpetrated by male Muslim extremists. Common sense tells us that future attacks are likely to come from the same source. But we must not acknowledge that fact. Well, as Voltaire observed, common sense isn't very common. At least so it seems when political correctness comes into play. Eugene P. Carver Rancho Palos Verdes

When the Colony Studio Theatre decided to revive "Candide," fate had a hand in it. Can there be a more cynical time--ergo a better time--to revive "Candide" than right now? To steal shamelessly (and repeatedly) from Voltaire, on whose best of all possible satires this good-natured musical is based, it is always the best of all possible times to revive it. "Candide" speaks volumes about human contrariness in the best of all possible ways: with cunning and a sly wit.

Rancho Santiago College's Professional Actors Conservatory sidles up to "Candide" like a tipsy conventioneer looking for a party. Director Victor Pappas never lets up in keeping the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical adaptation of Voltaire's classic satire a giddy, vaudevillian experience. That's fine--for about the first act. The silliness is good fun at the outset, when the broad but often fresh style and Pappas' hard-working cast mesh nicely.

In "Voltaire in Exile," Ian Davidson presents a miniaturist's view of the vast panorama of 18th century cultural change and upheaval we know as the Enlightenment, focusing on the last 25 years in the life of one of its embodiments, the French philosophe Voltaire, to give the contemporary reader a sense of the excitement and uncertainty of the movement that laid the foundations of the modern world.

As celebrity love triangles go, among the most complicated -- and historically significant -- was one that found the 18th century French writer Voltaire caught in an emotional tug of war between his mistress, the brilliant aristocratic Emilie du Chatelet, and his admirer, Frederick the Great, the poet-warrior king of Prussia. Their amorous adventures helped shape the turbulent intellectual, political and religious currents in an age of cultural transition.

"Champagne," actress Marlene Dietrich said, "gives you the impression that it's Sunday, that the best days are still to come." But there's more to the roi du vins than mere bubbles and promises, as my husband, David, and I found on a visit last winter to the Champagne region.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum last fall, a painting near the end of the great retrospective exhibition of French Enlightenment sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon showed the artist at work in his studio. His friend Louis-Leopold Boilly painted Houdon in the midst of sculpting an academic figure from a nude model, seated to the right. A figural pyramid anchors Boilly's composition, in good Neo-Classical fashion, with its stable base established by Houdon and his subject.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has received the gift of a life-sized plaster sculpture of French thinker Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon. Houdon, widely considered Europe's finest 18th century sculptor, is best known for his sculptures of Thomas Jefferson (the basis for the portrait on the nickel), George Washington (a heroic marble statue), Benjamin Franklin and the French writer and encyclopedist Diderot. The J.

Re "We've Had Enough Witch Hunts," Commentary, June 4: Let me get this straight. Robert Scheer would have us ignore the obvious. Like it or not, most terrorist acts over the last 30 years have been perpetrated by male Muslim extremists. Common sense tells us that future attacks are likely to come from the same source. But we must not acknowledge that fact. Well, as Voltaire observed, common sense isn't very common. At least so it seems when political correctness comes into play. Eugene P. Carver Rancho Palos Verdes

The New York Times characterizes the tsunami that struck coastal Japan as "murderous," while a friend writes that "Planet Earth is an unfriendly place. " I rode out the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in my seventh-floor apartment in San Francisco, which experience instilled in me an appropriate terror and respect for the fluidity of so-called terra firma. The epicenter of that 6.1 earthquake was located far from my home ? from which I infer that I can only imagine the power and trauma of a 9.0 quake centered close to the Japanese coast.

San Diego could be improved. If the county had 75 miles of beaches instead of 70. If the Padres won a World Series or the Chargers won a Super Bowl. Or if the municipal sloganeers dropped "America's finest city" in favor of "You stay classy, San Diego. " But this is nit-picking. Besides its most obvious tourist attractions - the beaches, the zoo and Old Town - San Diego's downtown has interesting edges, several old neighborhoods are showing new vigor, and everybody seems to be brewing artisan beer.

What appears to be a hippie in a cowboy hat is, in fact, Francois Marie Voltaire, resurrected, much as John Wayne is in that beer commercial. The drawing of the famous French philosopher--his eight gallons of curly locks hanging out from under a 10-gallon hat--is the logo for Ventura's new/old place with the long name, Cafe Voltaire's Ban-Dar.

Cafe Voltaire is dead and so is the old Ban-Dar, but long live Cafe Voltaire's Ban-Dar, Ventura's newest venue in an old location and now a hybrid of country and original music in a classic dive bar setting. The new place, which can hold more than 200 people, will host its official grand opening gig tonight featuring Jimmy Adams & Friends and rock-star-to-be Jonathan McEuen.